Epstein and the history of rape kits

 In part, what we are seeing now with the partial publication of the Epstein files - and the gross reality that nobody will be prosecuted or even investigated for prosecution, in a case that spans the time between 2006 when he was indicted by a Florida Grand Jury and 2019 when he was strangled - is that his case is not being treated with attention to its anchoring in 21st century U.S. history.

Which is a shame. During this time period, other large historical facts were impinging on the perennial question: how criminally patriarchal is our society? When we see a Chomsky decrying the "hysteria" of woke women in 2019, it is a partial glimpse into what happened as "cancel culture" - entrenched establishment figures actually getting fired for sexual harrassment or assault - was overwhelmed by reactionary culture.

"Believe the women" started out as a rather brave utopian effort that could be translated, for instance, into: process decades of rape kits that the police carelessly stored in evidence lockers without every processing them, and account for the number that were simply destroyed because the justice system didn't give a fuck. Alas, that slogan is a bit long. But I do think we would all be served by connecting rapes in high places (committed on girls and boys who came from working class to middle class backgrounds) to rape in general. At the same time Noam Chomsky and Joi Ito and Stephen Kosslyn and Larry Summers, from their Boston area homes, were sending love to Jeffry, the headlines in Boston area papers bumped into the fact that in towns like Cambridge, Mass, the number of rape kits collected and stored but unprocessed by the cops was pretty high. It wasn't until 2016 that the Massachussetts government mandated saving rape kits for 15 years. Replacing a law requiring them to be saved for six months.

Here's a quote from the story about the Governor's conference where the new policy was announced.

"The new 15-year timeframe corresponds with the statute of limitations for rape and sexual assault.
Baker said he had asked Polito, who chairs the Governor's Council to Address Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence, to walk him through the details of the bill.
"At the end I looked at her and said, 'Well, why did it take so long for this to happen?' " Baker said, his words partially drowned out by laughter from the crowd assembled in his office for the signing ceremony. "I don't have a good answer for that one but I know many times it does require somebody to start the conversation."

That laughter - the mingled laughs of those who know that the system does not exist to punish the rapist, but to negotiate the victim away from causing trouble, and those who are generally clueless - is a tell.

You won't find any reference in the stories about Epstein to, say, Amanda Nguyen. She was a Harvard student in 2013 when she was assaulted. 2013 was also when Epstein and his friend, Harvard Professor Nowak, were talking about getting Epstein an office at Harvard. A place he could go to and relax. Nguyen didn't want to have her life disrupted by devoting herself full time to the tracking down and trial of her assailant. But she also didn't want her rape kit destroyed - which, as she would discover, would happen to it if she didn't inform the police every six months that she wanted it preserved.

Here's the system in all its beauty: the victim had to keep the police from destroying evidence of the crime. So Nguyen, in 2014 - when Harvard Professor Larry Summers and Epstein were deep into discussions of foreign policy and how to turn a mentoring relationship into hotness - founded RISE, an organization aimed at preserving the evidence of sexual assault for longer than the lifespan of a fruitfly. It worked: in 2016, Congress passed the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act, which tied the evidence to the statute of limitations on the crime of sexual assault.

But of course it didn't mandate rape kits were actually to be processed. That is so expensive! And money was needed elsewhere - for instance, buying tanks and neat body armor, and making sure that the police union president was comfortable, and like that. So to process the kits, private parties - non-profit feminist groups, for instance, or what Chomsky might refer to as hysterical women - actually raised money through things like bake sales.
Oh this history! Many of the facts in the history of the rape kit have been gathered into one place by Kennedy Pagan. I recommend reading her book, The Secret History of the Rape Kit, or the article that started it, here.